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If you’re working, you’re pretty much inevitably working within a team – whether it’s a formal one in a large organisation, or a more individual one involving family members helping you to perform effectively. Or a team could involve other departments in your organisation, other businesses, suppliers and even clients.

Many of us feel different when we return to work from a break. If you come back with better ideas, more energy and more creativity, it may be because your way of working is out of balance, or perhaps you’re just working too hard.

Do you believe that the training courses you’ve done have been truly valuable? Do you use what you’ve learned in your everyday working life? Often people are dubious, if not negative, about the training they’ve done and the benefit to them. It is possible to make training stick, and have a lasting benefit.

The term team is used a lot in many different contexts, but it is rarely used accurately. The reason it is rarely used accurately is that to understand what a team really is you have to experience it. And experience of teamwork is sufficiently rare that few us have had it.

This question is part of the mystery of the nature of humankind. What are we in essence? And in influencing collaboration in people and groups are we taking people back towards, or away from, their natural behavioural roots?

Teamwork has become the default way of working in organisations. Many of us have a long-lasting romance with teams, yet we rarely stop and question the assumptions. Like breathing, we just do it. Is teamwork still a safe bet or is it ‘last century’?

Yesterday we mentioned a video by Dan Pink on the surprising truth about what motivates us. Here it is:

What do you understand by ‘team development’? Here are some of the answers we get when we’re talking to the business managers and directors who are our prospective clients. They say:”Oh we do a lot of team development. We go out for a big meal together every month. In fact we’re going out for one next week.”

Someone showed us this the other day. This guy is the CEO of Microsoft and clearly thinks he knows a thing or two about energising his people. Take a look:

Listening to the news these days, especially the business news, can be unsettling. It all sounds dire, and you have doubtless had to increase your focus on business development. While this is clearly the right way to go, it can seem to make the job of leading and managing your people very challenging.